Get Organized: Clean Up Your RSS Feed Reader

With the dirge still playing for Google Reader and RSS fans migrating to new services, now is an ideal time to reorganize your feeds. Here are some suggestions for how to do it.

Nothing motivates me to clean up like having to move. When I move house, which I do more often than I like, I see it as a time to purge junk and scrub the new place from corner to corner before moving in any of my stuff. And that's how I feel about RSS feed readers right now.

Today marks the end of Google Reader, a day when Reader users will be faced with picking a new feed reader or giving up on RSS altogether. But change can be good, because a move to a new RSS feed reader could mean it's time to clean house, get rid of all those dead blog feeds, cut the news feeds that are in fact blatant celebrity gossip channels, and re-organize what's left into a neat set of folders.

Here are some ideas on how you can clean up and organize your RSS feeds quickly and efficiently.

Organize By Theme
Probably the most common way people organize their RSS feeds is to group them by theme or topic. For example, a folder of foods labeled "Business News" would have all your favorite RSS feeds for business news, naturally.

I have folders of feeds called "Food Blogs US" and "Food Blogs AUS" where I keep an eye on the American and Australian food scenes, respectively (a lot of neat food-related stuff has been happening in Sydney these last few years, by the way).

This solution works if you like to read your feeds based on topic. But in some cases, depending on your subscriptions and how you read them, it doesn't make sense to organize your RSS feeds by topic.

The 'Email' Approach
Another tactic would be to move into folders all the feeds you don't read all that often and stick everything else into an "Inbox" folder.

Most of us have plenty of feeds that we only glance at or scan, and hardly ever read. You could put these lesser-read feeds into folders labeled however you choose, and leave your most important feeds in a folder called "_INBOX," using that underscore to make sure it sorts to the top of the pile alphabetically.

This approach mimics what some people do with email: leave the most important stuff in the inbox where it's most visible and move to a folder everything else. Pretty smart, yet entirely simple, right?

But actually, this doesn't work equally well in all RSS feed readers. It's a breeze in Digg Reader because that service lets you order your feeds and folders any which way. Feedly, though, puts all your loose feeds into a folder called "Uncategorized." In other words, you can't have loose feeds. Everything must be in a folder, but you can drag those folders into any order you like. In The Old Reader any uncategorized feeds go into a "Subscriptions" folder.

If you want ultimate control over your folder organization and feed list order, Digg Reader is probably your best bet, although it comes with other limitations, such as the inability to import OPML files from other services. If you can't import an OPML file, you won't be able to import your feeds from another service (you will have access to your Google Reader feeds if you had set up Digg Reader prior to July 1); and you won't be able to do the other tricks described below in the section "Cleaning up the OPML File."

Organize By How You Read
Another way to organize folders in your RSS feed reader would be not by theme but by how you read, which is what I started to hint at in that last tip about mimicking the structure of email.

Heck, you could even start with a folder called "INBOX" where you put feeds you check most frequently. Maybe your next feed folder is called "Headline News" and contains RSS feeds of breaking news sources and blogs that you use to scan headlines. Another folder might be called "Long-Form Reading," for feeds of content that tend take more time and focus, reads to which you do typically devote some time each week. Maybe there's another folder called "Monthly Check-in." You get the idea.